The Heart of the Matter (11 page)

‘It’s late. I thought you’d be asleep.’

‘I couldn’t sleep until we’d had our hunt. The idea’s grown on me, old man. We might have a monthly prize. I can see the time coming when other people will want to join in.’

Wilson said with irony, ‘There might be a silver cup.’

‘Stranger things have happened, old man. The Cockroach Championship.’

He led the way, walking softly on the boards to the middle of his room: the iron bed stood under its greying net, the armchair with collapsible back, the dressing-table littered with old
Picture Posts
. It shocked Wilson once again to realize that a room could be a degree more cheerless than his own.

‘We’ll draw our rooms alternate nights, old man.’

‘What weapon shall I use?’

‘You can borrow one of my slippers.’ A board squeaked under Wilson’s feet and Harris turned warningly. ‘They have ears like rats,’ he said.

‘I’m a bit tired. Don’t you think that tonight …?’

‘Just five minutes, old man. I couldn’t sleep without a hunt. Look, there’s one—over the dressing-table. You can have first shot,’ but as the shadow of the slipper fell upon the plaster wall, the insect shot away.

‘No use doing it like that, old man. Watch
me
.’ Harris stalked his prey. The cockroach was half-way up the wall, and Harris, as he moved on tiptoe across the creaking floor, began to weave the light of his torch backwards and forwards over the cockroach. Then suddenly he struck and left a smear of blood. ‘One up,’ he said. ‘You have to mesmerize them.’

To and fro across the room they padded, weaving their lights, smashing down their shoes, occasionally losing their heads and pursuing wildly into corners: the lust of the hunt touched Wilson’s imagination. At first their manner to each other was ‘sporting’; they would call out, ‘Good-shot’ or ‘Hard Luck’, but once they met together against the wainscot over the same cockroach when the score was even, and their tempers became frayed.

‘No point in going after the same bird, old man,’ Harris said.

‘I started him.’

‘You lost your one, old man. This was mine.’

‘It was the same. He did a double turn.’

‘Oh no.’

‘Anyway, there’s no reason why I shouldn’t go for the same one. You drove it towards me. Bad play on your part.’

‘Not allowed in the rules,’ Harris said shortly.

‘Perhaps not in your rules.’

‘Damn it all,’ Harris said, ‘I invented the game.’

A cockroach sat upon the brown cake of soap in the washbasin. Wilson spied it and took a long shot with the shoe from six feet away. The shoe landed smartly on the soap and the cockroach span into the basin: Harris turned on the tap and washed it down. ‘Good shot, old man,’ he said placatingly. ‘One D.D.’

‘D.D. be damned,’ Wilson said. ‘It was dead when you turned on the tap.’

‘You couldn’t be sure of that. It might have been just unconscious—concussion. It’s D.D. according to the rules.’

‘Your rules again.’

‘My rules are the Queensberry rules in this town.’

‘They won’t be for long,’ Wilson threatened. He slammed the door hard behind him and the walls of his own room vibrated round him from the shock. His heart beat with rage and the hot night: the sweat drained from his armpits. But as he stood there beside his own bed, seeing the replica of Harris’s room around him, the washbasin, the table, the grey mosquito-net, even the cockroach fastened on the wall, anger trickled out of him and loneliness took its place. It was like quarrelling with one’s own image in the glass. I was crazy, he thought. What made me fly out like that? I’ve lost a friend.

That night it took him a long while to sleep, and when he slept at last he dreamed that he had committed a crime, so that he woke with the sense of guilt still heavy upon him. On his way down to breakfast he paused outside Harris’s door. There was no sound. He knocked, but there was no answer. He opened the door a little way and saw obscurely through the grey net Harris’s damp bed. He asked softly, ‘Are you awake?’

‘What is it?’

‘I’m sorry Harris, about last night.’

‘My fault, old man. I’ve got a touch of fever. I was sickening for it. Touchy.’

‘No, it’s my fault. You are quite right. It
was
D.D.’

‘We’ll toss up for it, old man.’

‘I’ll come in tonight.’

‘That’s fine.’

But after breakfast something took his mind right away from Harris. He had been in to the Commissioner’s office on his way down town and coming out he ran into Scobie.

‘Hallo,’ Scobie said, ‘what are you doing here?’

‘Been in to see the Commissioner about a pass. There are so many passes one has to have in this town, sir. I wanted one for the wharf.’

‘When are you going to call on us again, Wilson?’

‘You don’t want to be bothered with strangers, sir.’

‘Nonsense. Louise would like another chat about books. I don’t read them myself, you know, Wilson.’

‘I don’t suppose you have much time.’

‘Oh, there’s an awful lot of time around,’ Scobie said, ‘in a country like this. I just don’t have a taste for reading, that’s all. Come into my office a moment while I ring up Louise. She’ll be glad to see you. Wish you’d call in and take her for a walk. She doesn’t get enough exercise.’

‘I’d love to,’ Wilson said, and blushed hurriedly in the shadows. He looked around him: this was Scobie’s office. He examined it as a general might examine a battleground, and yet it was difficult to regard Scobie as an enemy. The rusty handcuffs jangled on the wall as Scobie leant back from his desk and dialled.

‘Free this evening?’

He brought his mind sharply back, aware that Scobie was watching him: the slightly protruding, slightly reddened eyes dwelt on him with a kind of speculation. ‘I wonder why you came out here,’ Scobie said. ‘You aren’t the type.’

‘One drifts into things,’ Wilson lied.

‘I don’t,’ Scobie said, ‘I’ve always been a planner. You see, I even plan for other people.’ He began to talk into the telephone. His intonation changed: it was as if he were reading a part—a part which called for tenderness and patience, a part which had been read so often that the eyes were blank above the mouth.
Putting
down the receiver, he said, ‘That’s fine. That’s settled then.’

‘It seems a very good plan to me,’ Wilson said.

‘My plans always start out well,’ Scobie said. ‘You two go for a walk, and when you get back I’ll have a drink ready for you. Stay to dinner,’ he went on with a hint of anxiety. ‘We’ll be glad of your company.’

When Wilson had gone, Scobie went in to the Commissioner. He said, ‘I was just coming along to see you, sir, when I ran into Wilson.’

‘Oh yes, Wilson,’ the Commissioner said. ‘He came in to have a word with me about one of their lightermen.’

‘I see.’ The shutters were down in the office to cut out the morning sun. A sergeant passed through carrying with him, as well as his file, a breath of the Zoo behind. The day was heavy with unshed rain: already at 8.30 in the morning the body ran with sweat. Scobie said, ‘He told me he’d come about a pass.’

‘Oh yes,’ the Commissioner said, ‘that too.’ He put a piece of blotting-paper under his wrist to absorb the sweat as he wrote. ‘Yes, there was something about a pass too, Scobie.’

2

I

MRS SCOBIE LED
the way, scrambling down towards the bridge over the river that still carried the sleepers of an abandoned railway.

‘I’d never have found this path by myself,’ Wilson said, panting a little with the burden of his plumpness.

Louise Scobie said, ‘It’s my favourite walk.’

On the dry dusty slope above the path an old man sat in the doorway of a hut doing nothing. A girl with small crescent breasts climbed down towards them balancing a pail of water on her head; a child naked except for a red bead necklace round the waist played in a little dust-paved yard among the chickens; labourers carrying hatchets came across the bridge at the end of their day. It was the hour of comparative coolness, the hour of peace.

‘You wouldn’t guess, would you, that the city’s just behind us?’ Mrs Scobie said. ‘And a few hundred yards up there over the hill the boys are bringing in the drinks.’

The path wound along the slope of the hill. Down below him Wilson could see the huge harbour spread out. A convoy was gathering inside the boom; tiny boats moved like flies between the ships; above them the ashy trees and the burnt scrubs hid the summit of the ridge. Wilson stumbled once or twice as his toes caught in the ledges left by the sleepers.

Louise Scobie said, ‘This is what I thought it was all going to be like.’

‘Your husband loves the place, doesn’t he?’

‘Oh, I think sometimes he’s got a kind of selective eyesight. He sees what he likes to see. He doesn’t seem to see the snobbery, and he doesn’t hear the gossip.’

‘He sees you,’ Wilson said.

‘Thank God he doesn’t, because I’ve caught the disease.’

‘You aren’t a snob.’

‘Oh yes, I am.’

‘You took
me
up,’ Wilson said, blushing and contorting his face into a careful careless whistle. But he couldn’t whistle. The plump lips blew empty air, like a fish.

‘For God’s sake,’ Louise said, ‘don’t be humble.’

‘I’m not really humble,’ Wilson said. He stood aside to let a labourer go by. He explained, ‘I’ve got inordinate ambitions.’

‘In two minutes,’ Louise said, ‘we get to the best point of all—where you can’t see a single house.’

‘It’s good of you to show me …’ Wilson muttered, stumbling on again along the ridge track. He had no small talk: with a woman he could be romantic, but nothing else.

‘There,’ Louise said, but he had hardly time to take the view in—the harsh green slopes falling down towards the great flat glaring bay—when she wanted to be off again, back the way they had come. ‘Henry will be in soon,’ she said.

‘Who’s Henry?’

‘My husband.’

‘I didn’t know his name. I’d heard you call him something else—something like Ticki.’

‘Poor Henry,’ she said. ‘How he hates it. I try not to when other people are there, but I forget. Let’s go.’

‘Can’t we go just a little further—to the railway station?’

‘I’d like to change,’ Louise said, ‘before dark. The rats begin to come in after dark.’

‘Going back will be downhill all the way.’

‘Let’s hurry then,’ Louise said. He followed her. Thin and ungainly, she seemed to him to possess a sort of Undine beauty. She had been kind to him, she bore his company, and automatically at any first kindness from a woman love stirred. He had no capacity for friendship or for equality. In his romantic, humble, ambitious mind he could conceive only a relationship with a waitress, a cinema usherette, a landlady’s daughter in Battersea or with a queen—this was a queen. He began to mutter again at her heels—‘so good’—between pants, his plump knees knocking together on the stony path. Quite suddenly the light changed: the laterite soil turned a
translucent
pink sloping down the hill to the wide flat water of the bay. There was something happily accidental in the evening light as though it hadn’t been planned.

‘This is it,’ Louise said, and they leant and got their breath again against the wooden wall of the small abandoned station, watching the light fade out as quickly as it came.

Through an open door—had it been the waiting room or the station master’s office?—the hens passed in and out. The dust on the windows was like the steam left only a moment ago by a passing train. On the forever-closed guichet somebody had chalked a crude phallic figure. Wilson could see it over her left shoulder as she leant back to get her breath. ‘I used to come here every day,’ Louise said, ‘until they spoilt it for me.’

‘They?’

She said, ‘Thank God, I shall be out of here soon.’

‘Why? You are not going away?’

‘Henry’s sending me to South Africa.’

‘Oh God,’ Wilson exclaimed. The news was so unexpected that it was like a twinge of pain. His face twisted with it.

He tried to cover up the absurd exposure. No one knew better than he did that his face was not made to express agony or passion. He said, ‘What will he do without you?’

‘He’ll manage.’

‘He’ll be terribly lonely,’ Wilson said—he, he, he chiming back in his inner ear like a misleading echo I, I, I.

‘He’ll be happier without me.’

‘He couldn’t be.’

‘Henry doesn’t love me,’ she said gently, as though she were teaching a child, using the simplest words to explain a difficult subject, simplifying … She leant her head back against the guichet and smiled at him as much as to say, it’s quite easy really when you get the hang of it. ‘He’ll be happier without me,’ she repeated. An ant moved from the woodwork on to her neck and he leant close to flick it away. He had no other motive. When he took his mouth away from hers the ant was still there. He let it run on to his finger. The taste of the lipstick was like something he’d never tasted before and that he would always remember. It seemed to him that an act had been committed which altered the whole world.

‘I hate him,’ she said, carrying on the conversation exactly where it had been left.

‘You mustn’t go,’ he implored her. A bead of sweat ran down into his right eye and he brushed it away; on the guichet by her shoulder his eyes took in again the phallic scrawl.

‘I’d have gone before this if it hadn’t been for the money, poor dear. He has to find it.’

‘Where?’

‘That’s man’s business,’ she said like a provocation, and he kissed her again; their mouths clung like bivalves, and then she pulled away and he heard the sad—to and fro—of Father Rank’s laugh coming up along the path. ‘Good evening, good evening,’ Father Rank called. His stride lengthened and he caught a foot in his soutane and stumbled as he went by. ‘A storm’s coming up,’ he said. ‘Got to hurry,’ and his ‘ho, ho, ho’ diminished mournfully along the railway track, bringing no comfort to anyone.

‘He didn’t see who we were,’ Wilson said.

‘Of course he did. What does it matter?’

‘He’s the biggest gossip in the town.’

‘Only about things that matter,’ she said.